Online Surveys

Our Surveys

Foster and Brown Research have many years experience in the design of survey content and the analysis of the data once collected. We work with you to produce the questions most likely to give the information you really need. Over the last few years, we have specialised in research aimed at the health and wellbeing of children and adults, including the ongoing Gloucestershire Online Pupil Survey.

We will build your survey, sort out the database, and offer online reporting using our reporting tool Lodeseeker®. We host both the survey and data on our secure server, which allows for ease of development on our side and assurance to your target recipients that pesonal identity will be protected. The data is, of course, yours and can be supplied in the usual electronic formats, such as Excel or csv should you not want to sign up to our Lodeseeker™ reporting option.

Although there are 'do it yourself' surveys to be found on the web that are very good (and sometimes free - see surveymonkey as a good example), we believe that if your project has any complexity, then getting help from experienced researchers is well worth the money. Not only are you more likely to produce questions that give you the information you are looking for, but the user experience will be a lot better - reflecting your company or organisation in a much better light.

Because we can respond to your individual needs, we can produce a survey that gives you exactly what you want. We can also take you through the whole process from planning to analysis so you get the most out of the data you gather.

Survey Management

Foster & Brown Research deliver online surveys and reporting as a managed package, helping to take you through the process of gathering vital information and using our software and expertise to help you target areas of need as efficiently as possible.

We can help with:

• getting your questions right
• designing the look and feel of your surveys
• managing your distribution list and monitoring response rate through our Monitor software
• reporting your results through our LodeSeeker® software
• analysing your results using our expertise and helping you identify targets and trends

Online Pupil Survey

Foster & Brown Research are working with Local Authorities to offer the Online Pupil Survey-Pupil Health and Lifestyle Survey to ALL the schools in their area providing a powerful Pupil Voice telling us about the lives, daily habits, fears and aspirations of thousands of children and young people - information that helps schools, local authorities, health professionals and many other organisations concerned with the wellbeing of young people to plan effectively and efficiently.

View details of our school surveys »

Contact Us

on 01285 700759 or email to discuss your requirements or ask any questions you may have. We are very happy to talk through what we are achieving with our Local Authority partners.

Survey Features

Inputs: As with other surveys, we have different methods of getting answers to our questions, including radio buttons, check boxes and free text input. However, our main method of collecting answers is based on a sliding 1000 point scale (0-100 with 1 decimal place) superimposed onto a categorical scale:

This replaces the normal array of radio buttons that you see on most surveys.

The advantage of this is that the respondents can choose where they want to be on the scale - they are not restricted to a choice between "very involved" and "quite involved" - they can choose to place their answer between the 2 - so they can say they are "involved".

The results are numbers - so, for example, "involved" might be recorded as 87.9 or it might be 82.3. This gives us the possibility to present the results as both a categorical scale (e.g. 87.9 would score in the "very involved" category, 82.3 would score in the "quite involved" category) or as a number - which means we can calculate averages as well as being able to do lots more statistical analyses.

Navigation: we have page navigation, which is triggered by a particular answer to a question - for example, if the question is "are you a boy or a girl?" we could either ask "boy" questions or "girl" questions depending on the answer.

Hidden questions: we can hide questions until a particular response is given, for example, a question "do you like ice cream?" could have a yes or no response. If the response is "yes", a further question could appear, for example "what flavour ice-cream do you like?". This avoids asking irrelevant questions to those who do not have an opinion or would not know how to answer and it also helps keep the survey pages shorter and less cluttered.

Design:we believe in good, appropriate design. For an adult survey, colours may be muted and 'grown up' - for our school surveys, on the other hand, we have bright colours, populated with interesting and funny cartoons like our OPS frogs,

so that interest is maintained throughout the survey. The children enjoy the experience and remember the survey positively, so when they are asked to do it again, they are pleased to do so.